David

David is the professor in charge of the lab Nelly is part of! Like any self-respecting academic, he’s more than a bit eccentric, with random memorabilia scattered around his office and a frankly concerning number of random anecdotes to hit students with. He’s married (I haven’t designed his wife oops) with no kids, so he channels a lot of his energy into his work and his students. He firmly believes that students deserve research experiences and does his best to provide that to anyone who comes his way. Before becoming a professor, David worked in an industrial lab setting, where he designed new quality control methods for assessing foodstuffs. His background is in Microbiology, but his true fascination has always lay in organisms that utilize magic in one way or another. When it comes to microbes, this is woefully unstudied–and there’s little incentive to do it in industry–so David moved to academia to start a lab working with magic-utilizing microbes! It’s a niche field within a niche field, but he’s fairly well-respected for pioneered culture techniques that isolate magic-seeking bacteria (Hint: It involves giving them a consistent, steady magic source, who would have guessed). As far as actual application goes, there aren’t many, though David has hypothesized that finding a microbe that’s particularly good at sucking up magic could help to ‘decontaminate’ areas that are saturated with the stuff and thus dangerous to traverse. It’s hard to say for sure, but it’s all very exciting, if you like needing a microscope to see all your little guys! When the beacon to Elysium was established permanently in his university’s city, David was thrilled, but researchers were not initially granted permission to enter Elysium for the purposes of studying. It’s only recently that David has been given the green light to go and take samples. He’s desperately curious to know what sort of microbes live in Elysium, and if any of them have properties that might be useful elsewhere.